What’s a bad cop?
Ever since the police procedural became part of the TV landscape, writers have been trying to define that question. The easy answer in recent years would be Michael Chiklis’ Vic Mackey on The Shield, the cop who had no problem beating up on suspects – and was given too much latitude by the LAPD to do it – and who had no problem taking drug dealer’s contraband to finance his retirement fund. But again, that’s corrupt. It’s not what I mean by bad.
Viewers from an earlier era would look upon the portrayal of Andy Sipcowicz portrayed by Dennis Franz for more than a decade on NYPD Blue as the cliché version of it. He is bigoted, even towards his African-American boss, also has no problem beating a suspect up if he has too and is cynical beyond nature towards how prosecutors work. That’s closer to what I mean, but we’re still not there. Creator David Milch went so far out of his way to make it seem like a man who could be a bigot and still likable that he might be able to have certain redeeming qualities. (He would also hedge his bets by having Sipcowicz’s character go through so many tragedies in his life that by the time he Milch left the series, Job would feel sorry for Andy.)
What I consider a ‘bad’ cop is basically the kind of cop who puts in the minimum amount of effort at his job, barely considers the murders he investigates worth solving, and is often far more concerned with his life outside of it that he can’t even be bothered to hide it. And those kinds of cops showed up quite a bit on Homicide.
Now to be clear, none of the detectives on Homicide were saints. Frank Pembleton was a brilliant cop, but his arrogance and pride made it hard for most of his fellow detectives to work with him. John Munch (the incomparable Richard Belzer) spent his entire career at the Baltimore P.D. constantly being berated by his partners as to how lazy and slipshod he could be with procedural. And quite a few of the other detectives had their own prejudices to fellow detectives as well as the suspects they investigating that would become obvious over the run of the series. I’m thinking particularly of Meldrick Lewis (Clark Johnson) who had a petty streak towards many of the people he worked with over the years and was loathe to admit his own failings.
But some of the major characters on the series were the kind of detectives that you probably wouldn’t have found on any procedural before or since. They were the kind of cops who were petty towards everybody – their fellow detectives, their bosses, even the families of the victims whose murders they were investigating – and could hardly be bothered to do their jobs without showing how unpleasant they could be. I’m thinking of two particular characters whose tenures on the series didn’t quite overlap, but who the writers managed to have integral to the other – which was fitting because in a way, they were spiritual heirs.
The first was Beau Felton, in would be Daniel Baldwin’s greatest triumph as an actor. From the moment we meet Felton in the Pilot, he doesn’t want to answer the phone because he’s afraid that another unsolved case will end up weighing down his clearance rate. He makes aggressive remarks about Frank Pembleton before we even meet him and its understandable that Pembleton doesn’t want to work with him. In one of the funniest sequences the series would ever air, Pembleton has forgotten what keys will open the car they need to drive out of the Baltimore PD parking lot and rather than go upstairs and get another car, he methodically goes through every single car there.
Pembleton and Felton would often clash on race; Pembleton thinking Felton was a racist; Felton just as insistent he wasn’t. In an early episode, the two detectives go on search through a repo parking lot, trying to not find a potential suspects car to break up his alibi. Pembleton is determined to go through with it; Felton is lazy at every step of the way, even at one point making an offer on one of the cars in the lot. After searching three lots with no results, Pembleton insists on going to a lot that is miles out of their way. Felton says basically that they should just arrest the guy at now and that Pembleton is just doing this to prove Bayliss, the primary, wrong.
Pembleton’s response is one of the coldest and angriest he ever gave: “All night long, I’ve listened to you philosophize and criticize. I don’t care about Bayliss or you…All I care about is finding the monster who raped and murdered an eleven year old girl. If you can’t be bothered with that, go home.” Shamed Felton drives with him to the next lot, and eventually they do find the car.
It’s a rare moment of humility for Felton, and it doesn’t make him a better cop. In one of the more remarkable episodes of the series ‘Bop Gun’ Felton is named lead investigator on the murder of a tourist near Camden Yards. After interviewing the husband the other detectives are seen laughing at his inept ability to come up with an accurate description of the perps, Felton concludes his mockery by saying: “I’m going to rack up the overtime on this one.” The husband (one of Robin Williams’ greatest performances) witnesses this, and still in the clothes that have the blood stains of his wife on them, publicly berates Felton and demands to speak with Gee. Giardello manages to assuage the husband’s not by saying that Felton’s a good cop (he refuses to lie)
Felton was married with three children, and his marriage was never stable. In Season 3 it collapsed. First his wife Beth threw him out of the house and he began an affair with the new shift lieutenant Megan Russert. (When Kay Howard his partner confronted him, he just said: ‘My old man always said you don’t jump ship without a life preserver.) He would end the affair – which might have been a healthier relationship – and go back to Beth. Three episodes later, he returned home to find his wife and family gone, along with all his furniture. Written on the mirror in lipstick was simply: ‘Goodbye.’ Felton would crawl into the bottle and basically never come out. He spent much of the first half of the season searching for his kids and could barely be bother to the job when he was there – losing vital evidence on one case, and writing the name of a stone cold whodunit in the column of a fellow detective so he didn’t have to be bothered wasting his time.
I mentioned in a previous article that Felton would be part of a shooting involving two other detectives. His wounds were minor but in his eagerness to get out of the squad, he would go out to a crime scene, vomit in the total and when Gee confronted him, in one of his worst moves he through a cup at him. Giardello had never had much patience for Felton, but in a move of pure rage tore him a new one:
“I’m sick of covering for you…Your marriage has been falling apart as long as anybody can remember. You come to work looking as if you’ve crawled through every bar in Baltimore.” When Felton puts up the excuse of being shot, Gee levels him: “You weren’t up to the job before you were shot. That’s the truth. It’s time someone told you.”
That’s Felton’s career in a nutshell.
Whether his character would’ve ever changed is a moot point. In May of 1995 with Homicide’s renewal still up in the air Baldwin announced he was leaving the show. Rather than have another shooting, he and Stanley Bolander (Ned Beatty, who also wanted to leave) were written out when they attending a convention in New York, got drunk and ran wild. Felton was there, as Munch gleefully related, “wearing nothing but his holster.” He was suspended from the force for twenty-two weeks (the writer’s injoke about the length of a TV season.) Sadly it seems very much keeping in character with what we knew about Beau Felton on the show.
That would be the end of Baldwin’s role on the series. Felton’s character, however, would not entirely be finished with. Indeed, there is a direct link between his fate and the second ‘bad cop’ Homicide would illustrate. I will go into detail on him next.
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